Friday, July 14, 2006

Eli Lake-Akbar Ganji

“Once a supporter of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Akbar Ganji, like Iran's most senior cleric, Ayatollah Montazeri, has come to the position that the current regime has violated the democratic promise of the revolution.”

Mr. Lake does not explain what “democratic promise” he is referring to, that the Shiite regime is supposed to have violated. Did Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, promise democracy? Did the Rajavis promise democracy? How about the Fadayeen Guerillas, self-styled “communists” who supposedly believed in the establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, did they promise democracy? Did the makeup of the various participants in the 1979 Reaction in general, their violent rejection of the government of Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, or the very concept of a fundamentalist Islamist regime, which they, one and all, supported, suggest that the revolution was motivated by “democratic” ideals?

Let us suspend reason and assume, for the sake of argument, that the “revolution” did make that promise, that the revolutionaries were not only democratic, but that, additionally, they voted for an Islamic Republic in the belief that it would be democratic!

Would a democratic person, with a sense of what is and what is not “democratic”, have worked for the Islamist regime, even for a second, let alone for two decades, to begin with? Why did it take Mr. Ganji (or Mr. Sazegara, etc.) more than two decades to realize that the regime had violated that “democratic” promise when the anti-democratic, and more importantly, the anti-Iranian nature of the regime was clear from the beginning?